How Romney got out-organized by Obama

posted at 8:14 pm on November 8, 2012 by Allahpundit

I’ve been hoarding links on this subject all day because it’s the other side of the coin of how Romney lost. One side is the demographic challenge, which everyone understands by now. The GOP depends heavily on older voters, white voters, and men, and that’s not a base that’s going to carry you eternally into victory in a changing America. The other side is turning out the voters you do have by running a superior organization. This was supposed to be Romney’s strength, the reason to prefer him to Gingrich, Santorum, etc. Even if he didn’t always seem so “severely conservative,” he could be trusted to hold his own against Team Hopenchange in a battle of the ground games. After all, that’s his brand — he’s a managerial genius. If anyone could build a company capable of capturing the presidency, he could.

But he couldn’t. The one piece I want you to read before any other is John Ekdahl’s account of how badly Romney’s “ORCA” system failed. The idea was to use smart phones to maintain de facto “strike lists,” which would help HQ figure out which precincts across the country were turning out in lower numbers and in need of extra resources. Ekdahl:

While I was home, I took to Twitter and the web to try to find some answers. From what I saw, these problems were widespread. People had been kicked from poll watching for having no certificate. Others never received their pdf packets. Some were sent the wrong packets from a different area. Some received their packet, but their usernames and passwords didn’t work.

Now a note about the technology itself. For starters, this was billed as an “app” when it was actually a mobile-optimized website (or “web app”). For days I saw people on Twitter saying they couldn’t find the app on the Android Market or iTunes and couldn’t download it. Well, that’s because it didn’t exist. It was a website. This created a ton of confusion. Not to mention that they didn’t even “turn it on” until 6AM in the morning, so people couldn’t properly familiarize themselves with how it worked on their personal phone beforehand.

Next, and this part I find mind-boggingly absurd, the web address was located at “https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca”. Notice the “s” after http. This denotes it’s a secure connection, something that’s used for e-commerce and web-based email. So far, so good. The problem is that they didn’t auto-forward the regular “http” to “https” and as a result, many people got a blank page and thought the system was down. Setting up forwarding is the simplest thing in the world and only takes seconds, but they failed to do it. This is compounded by the fact that mobile browsers default to “http” when you just start with “www” (as 95% of the world does).

End result: “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help.” That’s what was going on in RomneyWorld. Meanwhile, in ObamaWorld, they were using behavioral scientists to build a gigantic database of current and potential voters and to fine tune their message at a granular level not only to win people’s votes but to get them to turn out. Read Sasha Issenberg at Slate for more on that.

“There is not much of a commitment to that type of research on the right,” says Daron Shaw, a University of Texas at Austin political scientist who worked on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. “There is no real understanding of the experimental stuff.”

If Republicans brought consumer data into politics during Bush’s re-election, Democrats are mastering the techniques that give campaigns the ability to understand what actually moves voters. As a result, Democrats are beginning to engage a wider set of questions about what exactly a campaign is capable of accomplishing in an election year: not just how to modify nonvoters’ behavior to get them to the polls, but what exactly can change someone’s mind outside of the artificial confines of a focus group.

“The asset that Karl Rove and his team built during the Bush era, with consumer data—that was good and valuable, but it’s static data,” says Cyrus Krohn, a former Republican National Committee e-campaign director and founder of the political-tech startup Crowdverb. “The Democrats have figured out how to harness dynamic data on top of static data.”

Issenberg, who’s looked at microtargeting in depth, says Democrats are sufficiently far ahead on this that the GOP won’t close the gap anytime soon. Obama’s team also succeeded by emphasizing personal, one-on-one contact with voters; there was an 11-point gap when voters were asked if they’d been visited at home by a campaign in Pew’s poll taken last week. Even with something as simple as buying airtime for ads, Romney reportedly used an unusual in-house system that made things more expensive than they needed to be. Again: This is precisely the sort of thing that he wasn’t supposed to be outmaneuvered on. His ideological heresies were worrisome, but the comfort in nominating him was that his campaign would be smart and efficient enough to fight Obama to a stalemate. Instead, news is breaking tonight that even though Nate Silver and Drew Linzer and Simon Jackman and various other statistical modelers all had a high degree of confidence in how the election would go by the end, Romney himself was reportedly genuinely shellshocked when he realized he’d lost. (An NYT story on his address to staffers notes that defeat seemed to “genuinely startle him.”) According to a senior advisor, “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.” With all the information they’d gathered from months of polling and voter outreach, no one inside the campaign had an inkling that Obama’s model of the election might be right? Even though Romney ended up trailing in the last national poll average before election day too? One Republican operative wondered to Politico whether the campaign’s cheery poll spin was a head fake, aimed at boosting GOP morale, or evidence that they just weren’t that smart. Now we know.

It pains me to say all that because I don’t want to scapegoat Romney. He’s a good man. There were, as I said, powerful demographic forces here that he was up against. Obama may well have run the best campaign organization ever assembled, and it’s hard to knock off an incumbent even in the best of times. I have no doubt that Romney’s ground game was stronger than any other GOP primary candidate’s ground game would have been. But that’s part of what makes this election result terrifying — the best manager in our presidential field got completely outmanaged. It’s hard enough to win when you’re at a disadvantage among registered voters, but when your guys can’t even keep pace organizationally with the opposition, you’re basically throwing elections away. Can’t anyone here play this game? I’ll leave you with this, from Jonathan Last:

There was, to my mind, only one qualitative argument generally made in favor of Romney: that his management experience made him uniquely qualified to be president. He was a “turn-around artist.” A “genius CEO.” Now even the claim that his private-sector ability to master organizations and rescue them was a variation on process. And it always struck me as a little dubious. For one thing, it’s not immediately clear how the skill set of the private-sector executive transfers to the job of managing the executive branch of the U.S. government. CEOs say jump and everyone around them says how high. The president says jump and half of Congress tries to countermand the order while getting him fired and the other branch of government gets to decide whether jumping is even theoretically allowed.

But at least this was a falsifiable claim. And the fact that Romney could not master even his own campaign organization in order to win an incredibly winnable election demonstrates–incontrovertiably–that it wasn’t true. If he was a turn-around artist, he would be president-elect right now.

Most political campaigns aren’t invalidated by a loss. A candidate puts forward an idea or a worldview and it can stand whether or not it’s embraced by voters. It has its own truth. But in the wake of his loss Romney’s campaign now looks ludicrous.

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Conservatives like to eat their own it seems. The problem isn’t with Romney. The majority of the electorate are the takers, and not the makers. The don’t care about his message of fiscal sanity, as long as they get what they want.

I think at the end, they saw all the enthusiasm and were told there was more enthusiasm on our side and were in their own little world. Like when he saw all those people at the parking ramp in Pennsylvania, he said it feels like we r winning. Think they got too wrapped up in the emotions of it all. Even though it looked like a blow out victory for Obama, it still was a close election in the swing states.

What was the core Dem strategy… Total focus on the WH and the Senate… they were the only Races that matter and deserve money… House races other than against conservative minorities (to maintain the narrative) are sacrificed and people brought to the polls are only being asked to vote for Prez/Senator so that its painless enough for them to do it (think about how Reid’s son was swamped in the NV governors race will Papa won pretty easily)…

WHY does this work??? Given the massive hike in baseline spending in 2009 and automatic annual increases, they won’t have to pass a budget for years (and they haven’t). Everything can be done now with EO’s and regulations, and they can ignore the law all they want as the House can never prosecute an impeachment…

More attempts at convincing the masses that Romney’s voters didn’t turn out. Got to make sure the masses don’t start to question too much why total votes were down 11% from 4 2008. People might actually start to question whether all votes were counted and we can’t have that.

This is exactly what I was worried about from the beginning. Romney brought along all of these incompetent retreads from the establishment GOP and Boston who had no idea how to run a modern-day political campaign. And then, even when they proved themselves incompetent, Romney–the guy who likes to be able to fire people–refused to fire them. Absolute incompetence and arrogance. Can’t believe I sent money to these rubes. I’m just amazed that we did this to ourselves AGAIN.

Wow. This makes me sad for him and his family. I know they gave their all. But, also, this can NEVER happen again.The GOP needs to, starting tomorrow work on getting that dynamic consumer data, we need to place more field offices in all the right places, so we are ready for 2014, and rolling strong in 2016.

You know what? I simply don’t care. If we are going to have a “taker” society, then I’m not wasting another single minute trying to make it better. I am going to work on being a better taker than my neighbor. And I’m going to prepare my kids for how best to succeed in the taker society.

I agree with WarEagle01 that he placed his faith in the wrong people. I thought that a few times earlier, but, obviously that was before all this. I think it was out of affection and loyalty though. Just my opinion.

It’s hard to beat an incumbent. Period. It is the exception, rather than the rule. We need to step out of the echo chamber and realize that Reagan isn’t coming back. Landslides are not possible and we’re going to have get better at organizing and turning out our base. It doesn’t just fall on the candidate. This is something that everyone in the party has to do.

End result: “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help.” That’s what was going on in RomneyWorld.

Good thing the nominee was a businessman who knows how to run things in the private sector. Competence in action. /this is sarcasm

This is a bunch more of the crap that’s everywhere chasing after the truth. The people that should have voted for Romney just didn’t come out – millions of them didn’t vote, and it wasn’t because some hardcore volunteer didn’t come grab them by the hand and drag them to the polls. Republican voters are not the kind of people laying around the house or hanging on the corner waiting for someone to show up and give them a reason to get off the couch. They decided not to vote, period. The choice was clear: the Romney campaign was adult, serious, respectful and competent, and Obama’s was childish, insulting and trivial, offering nothing. The right wing’s voters just blew it. I don’t know why they voted in the numbers even weaker than they did for McCain, but it wasn’t because they didn’t have a date to go to the polls with.

The voters chose poorly, because they didn’t know either candidate with much depth. The media didn’t do it’s job and neither did the voters. Most people I talked to knew nothing about Romney’s life, accomplishments or abilities. The only thing Romney could have done better was play up his resume’, and he should have.

I have to say, ORCA was a complete disaster. I had twitter conversation with John Ekdahl about it the night before the election and in the aftermath. I was a volunteer whose time was completely wasted that day. It pains me that 30,000 of us could have been put to better use.

We have miles to go to catch up with the left on this front. We have lots of high priced people who wring their hands on cue for Politico and yet volunteers are left dangling in the wind. There needs to be a massive reorganization from the GOP. I hope they are reading the writing on the wall.

More bs from the ABRs. Obama had 4 years to organize the lemmings. Thanks to the lengthy GOP primary aainst opponents who wouldn’t have drawn 40% of the vote Romney had 6 months to herd conservative and GOP cats.

Obama had the unqualified support of the corrupt media. Romney took friendly fire throughout.

17% of the electorate voted for Obama because he cares for people like them.

12% of all voters made up their minds in the last week before the election.

42% of voters said in exit polls that Hurricane Sandy was “important” to their vote.

I think that it was a combination of “all of the above”. By themselves no single thing being floated explains it. Not sandy, not demographics, not people staying home, not mismanagement, not fraud. There is no single silver bullet to explain this all away, it is all of it at once.
I think that it is quite possible that after O got his ass handed to him in the first debate his team decided to not take any single vote for granted, put their heads down, and powered on through across the finish line. We on the other hand, became so elated with the mere possibility of defeating O and having it within our grasp took the voters for granted to some degree and lost sight of the goal posts. This is what makes a difference in any thighs contest.

Oh well, hope that we learn from this and correct. Otherwise we are in the wild until we do.

But that’s part of what makes this election result terrifying — the best manager in our presidential field got completely outmanaged.

Good point AllahP. How about another terrifying fact? A man who has been a failure as president by any objective measure was still able to convince millions of brain dead and voters with cognitive dissonance to vote for hum. I give, uncle, whatever.

Mitt’s should have brought out all the rinos that said that we couldn’t possibly have newt as our nominee and have them talk bad about obama. The gop should have seen the problem with mitt after SC primary. But everyone focused on mitt’s advantages in the primaries which all disappeared in the general. I grew up un horse farm and in that biz it’s all about past performaces. If mit was a race horse he be a claimer. I mean my god people was his accomplishments in poltics. He beat a horrible candidate by .5% in gov race. Mitt was a horrible pol then,now and always

It shouldn’t have taken ORCA to get our people to the polls. Everyone knew there was an election and who was on the ballot. If people can’t get off their butt to vote against the worst president in history, we are doomed.

The only thing Romney could have done better was play up his resume’, and he should have.

bagoh20 on November 8, 2012 at 8:34 PM

And respond to the character assassination ads the Dems started running in the summer. Even if he was out of primary funds, he’s supposed to be worth up to $250 million. No limits on spending your own cash.

Even John Kerry took out a $6 million mortgage at one point on “his” Boston home. (OK, Teresa probably bought it and sold it to him for $1 and other consideration.)

I think Republicans now should just be rubber stamping anything that comes through relating to the economy. Defend the hard line on 1st and 2nd amendment rights, let everything else goes. Hell even fund abortion if a state approves it (for some reason I could see Red States geting more electoral votes in the future…).

They should really just let this car drive itself off the cliff. Start campaigning now on the culture side, remind voters of what’s happening and why.

Obama’s a fool when it comes to governing, but he is from the school of organizing, getting people fired up to protest. This is where we need to improve, the ground game needs to start now for whomever wins the primaries 3 years from now. You know they are….

While I’m sure there were plenty of screw ups by Team Romney in getting out the vote in the micro-sense, the reason he lost is that about 3 million LESS votes turned out for him than turned out for McCain, and not all of that can be attributed to GOTV/wonk failures. He was just too moderate for some of our base.

Also, Team Obama started building it’s 2012 GOTV effort from the first day after the election in 2008, something I hope the RNC is doing right now for our 2014 congressional races and for 2016. This costs millions, but you can’t wait until a year or a few months out to ratchet up the ground game, which is what happened.

With a 3-4 year headstart on ground game, with money to open offices all over the swing states and hire the personnel, which an incumbent naturally enjoys, and you won’t even need computers or smartphones. This is the future, and I hope the RNC takes note.

I’m like El Rushbo The folks that voted for Obie scare me more than Obie..:)

Dire Straits on November 8, 2012 at 8:42 PM

I held signs at intersections in support of candidates on election day and on the weekend before. People screamed obscenities at me, several times. I am a 110 pound, 60 year old grandmother. Yes, they scare me too. Unbelievable.

The only thing Romney could have done better was play up his resume’, and he should have. bagoh20 on November 8, 2012 at 8:34 PM

Your comment is excellent, however I disagree with this. The job of extolling Romney’s accomplishments and qualifications was a job for our pundits. They suck. Big time.

The graph put up by Ace this afternoon shows that Mitt satisfied a majority of the electorate that he shared their values; that he is a strong leader and has a strong vision for the future. He beat Obama in all these categories but lost the election because 17% of the electorate believes Obama cares more for them. This is infantile.

All this time I thought O was screwing around, chickening out on the serious issues by showing up on The View, talking to celeb mags, etc. I figured everyone else could see right through it, would certainly know what an unserious president he is. But they didn’t. Turns out his game was genius all along, because his target audience is just as shallow as he is. I think for me that’s one of the most disappointing takeaways here.

Hey, does anyone remember Romney’s ‘summer of love’ of 2012 when he sunned himself on rock chanting softly to the tune of a lute about how Obama was a likeable fellow while Team Obama saturated the Ohio airwaves for weeks on end with negative advertising? What a genius, this Romney guy.

I can speak directly about Orca as I was one of the volunteers who used it on election day. The phone part was only half of it. The other half was that they had bought a decades worth of consumer data. Thats how they targeted people.
As for the program. Yes it would have been much better had it been an actual app instead of a website. Here are excerpts from the last email (at 3 friggin am on election day):
“Getting Started with the App
=================
* The app runs on a mobile website that you access with your mobile browser.

So you can see they gave the right address and even told me to use the https prefix. That being said, I could not access the site for 2 hours on election day. Also it seemed the roll Orca had was not up to date. I could see names on the official roll that did not appear in Orca. Also the connection was not great and I would have to reload the roll if I did something like switch to another tab in my phones browser. Which took a few tries sometimes due to the building I was in.
Credentials. I had a problem with these as well. I’m in Tallahassee FL. I was supposed to have a shift as a poll watcher on saturday during early voting. My credentials did not get to the GOP office in time even though I was sent an email that they had arrived. The number and contact they gave me to call about the credentials did not return my call or email. But the credentials were there maybe the Wednesday after (or 6 days before election day). Strangely enough I was not credentialed through the Romney campaign, but rather the Connie Mack campaign (I’ve never had contact with the Mack campaign).

More bs from the ABRs. Obama had 4 years to organize the lemmings. Thanks to the lengthy GOP primary aainst opponents who wouldn’t have drawn 40% of the vote Romney had 6 months to herd conservative and GOP cats.

Obama had the unqualified support of the corrupt media. Romney took friendly fire throughout.

17% of the electorate voted for Obama because he cares for people like them.

12% of all voters made up their minds in the last week before the election.

42% of voters said in exit polls that Hurricane Sandy was “important” to their vote.

You can’t fix stupid. Romney was an excellent candidate.

Basilsbest on November 8, 2012 at 8:38 PM

+100
Somebody on Romney’s staff obviously F’ed up on this ORCA thing, but the fact of the matter is any smart person being honest would’ve said a year ago that it was highly unlikely that we would beat Obama as an incumbent with the media 100% trying to protect him. Romney came close when they spent $400+ million literally trying to paint him as a heartless murderer and who knows what could’ve happened if the distraction of Sandy didn’t happen 7 days before election…

Point being I’m not going to blame him. The Republican party in general lost by more than he did. The problems the GOP has have been around for 20+ years and it’s being tepid and not actively hitting back at the media/Democrats and playing their game. That needs to change or we will keep losing, especially younger voters who are being indoctrinated to think we’re all sexist racists.

More attempts at convincing the masses that Romney’s voters didn’t turn out. Got to make sure the masses don’t start to question too much why total votes were down 11% from 4 2008. People might actually start to question whether all votes were counted and we can’t have that.

But at least this was a falsifiable claim. And the fact that Romney could not master even his own campaign organization in order to win an incredibly winnable election demonstrates–incontrovertiably–that it wasn’t true. If he was a turn-around artist, he would be president-elect right now.

We have employers today testing out a program where they whack their full time employee in favor of part time employees to get out of paying the ObamaCare fine if the employer doesn’t offer insurance..

We are going to have millions of Americans having to have two jobs living paycheck-to-paycheck…and then struggling to pay for insurance themselves..

Yes..I know this happened in the yesteryears..
But is will escalate now..

Guys, I admit that Romneys GOTV and voter contact stuff should have been better. But come on. Why did ANY conservative or GOP voter need to be told to get off the couch and vote? They all knew it was election day and what was at stake. Many just didnt seem to give a crap. Romney was a great candidate, IMO.

It would almost be a better format than the blog platform HotAir uses now. (You guys really need to do something about that, unless it means automatically-playing videos like Breitbart.com, then nevermind)

this is incorrect…at least for large modern firms. (maybe Last has had some bad experience at the WS)

coalition building, team building, visioning, analyzing. I can only think that Bain capital was a tough business. It is not just about the numbers…it is about sizing up the people, watching out for the charlatans…building a team that you can trust.

barking out orders is not ‘in’…and hasn’t been for a long time…these are not straw bosses.